ABSTRACT
Sri Lanka’s contemporary architecture is typically represented as a built manifestation of the island’s religious imperial heritage, its European colonial history and its postcolonial reinvention. Such projections are utopian, with the capacity for imagining the timeless evolution of robust traditions in a picturesque tropical setting. Yet their discursive production and dissemination overwhelmingly occurred during protracted civil conflict. This paper describes “Sri Lankan architecture” as a defensive and artificial construct that has insulated the profession from dystopian wartime realities. Using architectural alterity as a conceptual framing it examines the socio-political biases of these utopian imaginings, and the harsher environments they obscure.
